The paperboard picture frame with which this disclosure is concerned was developed when trying to develop an improved personalized photocalendar, that is, a calendar of commercial quality which displays photographs selected by its owner. Personalized photocalendars are currently popular items of sale at photo processing shops, as well as drug stores, grocery stores, and other businesses which offer photo processing services. Producers of these photocalendars take photographic prints or negatives selected by a purchaser, digitize them, and then print them adjacent calendar pages and collate them. The collected matter is then bound to form a completed personalized photocalendar.
This process is subject to several disadvantages. First, the digitized and printed photos can suffer from image degradation due to digital scanning, enlargement, and printing processes, particularly if the photos are small or have degraded quality to start with. The digitized and printed pictures quite simply do not have the same appearance as photographs; the digitizing process lends the photos an unnatural-looking "grainy" quality, and the photos often suffer from minor changes in color and contrast. A particular problem with these photocalendars is that the digitized photos, being printed directly adjacent the calendar pages, cannot be removed from the calendars. Thus, if the owner wants to replace photos, e.g., because one or more photos are found to be aesthetically unpleasant, this can only be done by removal of entire pages.
A prior alternate method of producing personalized photocalendars was to take preexisting photographs and laminate them onto cardstock or other heavy material adjacent calendar pages. This process, which was largely used before the advent of the aforementioned digitizing technology and which is not known to be in current use, suffers from many of the same disadvantages of the digitizing process. First, the photos --which are sometimes expensive and irreplaceable--are permanently affixed to the calendar and cannot be altered or removed. Second, owing to occasional problems with the laminating process (e.g., bubbles in the laminating sheets, insufficient heating, or other problems), photos/calendar pages sometimes gain a defective appearance and are unsuitable for inclusion in the calendar. Third, this process required a relatively high expenditure of materials and time to integrate the photos into the calendar.